New Zealand history has a certain charm. Many skilled generals. An equal number of atrocities. A lack of rules of war. Courageous missionaries, some of whom are saints. Skilled political leaders: works of reconciliation, restoration: defeat, triumph and, finally, a reconciliation as much in the bedroom as any political apology.

But there is the horrid habit. The Maori ate their defeated enemies. Michael Bassett, who was a Labour Politician and is now a scholarly historian, noted on a legend that it was possibly hyperbole, but the issue of cannibalism is well known and well documented.

There is a more detailed study of culture contact by Anne Salmond which looks as though it will stretch to three volumes. The first two are out. Volume One is entitled Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans 1642-1772. It was published by Viking Press (Penguins) in Auckland and New York in 1991. It mentions cannibalism which first became a phenomenon in the 16th century when the scattered coastal Maori settlements grew in number, and population pressure pushed many inland. Protein was short. (Remember that there were no native animals of any kind in New Zealand, just fish and birds. New Zealand which today prides itself on possessing 60 million sheep and barely 4 million people did not see a sheep nor any pigs or cattle until after Captain Cook). Maori were warlike, and battles were sometimes followed by feasts of the vanquished. The victors believed that to eat one’s enemies was to destroy not only the physical being, but to eliminate their “mana” – their reputation, their standing amongst other Maori. Cook’s men were told in 1769 that eating the bodies of the victims of war was common amongst Maori. Some of Cook’s crew bought human bones from the native people and took them back to Europe. The French explorer, Marion du Fresne and 25 of his party, were killed and eaten in June 1772, the first European victims of cannibalism in NZ. The archaeologist, Janet Davidson, notes that a mix of human flesh and moa, the huge, flightless ostrich-like bird that the Maori rendered extinct in the early nineteenth century, seems to have been regarded as a real delicacy. The practice of cannibalism lingered into the nineteenth century. The northern chief Hong Hika and his warriors eat many of their victims after a war in the Bay of Islands in 1821. According to Patricia Burns in her biography of the fearsome Maori chief Te Rauparaha who died in 1849, the practice of cannibalism was drawn to the attention of potential European settlers in the New Zealand Company’s handook published in 1839. By that time the practice was pretty rare.
In other words, there has never been any mystery about cannibalism in NZ. It existed. Its practice from time to time, usually between warring Maori tribes, shocked early European settlers and visitors. In my youth Maori talked about the practice in a light-hearted way. I remember an old Maori causing hilarity by telling an audience that his grandfather was really European – by ingestion. “You are what you eat”, he added. Some historians these days don’t mention cannibalism very much. The more politically correct (ironically, usually Europeans) like to paint a picture of an ideal native society that was destroyed by European contact. But the available literature has plenty of references to cannibalism, and the truth of its existence will never be expunged.

Modern Maori are horrified by this. They converted over about two decades — and generally before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, which led to them gaining status as British Subjects — to Christianity, and that generally ended the two th three decades of wars that destroyed the warrior caste.

But it is where they came from. And it is not merely the Maori: the most recent documented ritual cannibalism was Mao’s Red Guards.

“In 10 years of catastrophe, Guangxi not only saw numerous deaths, they were also of appalling cruelty and viciousness,” the retired cadre wrote in an unpublished manuscript seen by AFP.

“There were beheadings, beatings, live burials, stonings, drownings, boilings, group slaughters, disembowellings, digging out hearts, livers, genitals, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and more, with no method unused.”

In 1968 a geography instructor named Wu Shufang was beaten to death by students at Wuxuan Middle School. The body was carried to the flat stones of the Qian river where another teacher was forced at gunpoint to rip out the heart and liver. Back at the school the pupils barbecued and consumed the organs.

Today the institution has been relocated and rebuilt, and current pupils shook their heads when asked if they were aware of what happened.

Residents of the old town say they do not know the history or meet questions with silence. The few willing to discuss the violence say memories are fading and the town is eager to escape its past.

These events scar a nation and a people. They sap the will. The guilt remains. And let us not be too quick to praise our ancestors, or claim it cannot happen. China had five thousand years of civilization. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.